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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/29359038">crux</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/thesecretdetectivecollection/pseuds/thesecretdetectivecollection'>thesecretdetectivecollection</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Daredevil (TV), The Punisher (TV 2017)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Gen, fratt week prompt: nail, it's super intense but also undefined?, so make of that what you will, this is the part of the relationship where</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-02-11</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-02-11</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-13 04:07:41</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Graphic Depictions Of Violence</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,493</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/29359038</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/thesecretdetectivecollection/pseuds/thesecretdetectivecollection</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Fisk thinks it would be fitting for the Devil of Hell's Kitchen to die by crucifixion.</p><p>---</p><p>Hell's Kitchen is quiet tonight, but Frank Castle knows better than most that the only time the city is quiet is when the scumbags are whispering.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Frank Castle &amp; Matt Murdock</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>10</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>74</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Collections:</b></td><td>Fratt Week</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>crux</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>It’s been a slow night. Slow enough that some people might think that crime was taking a break.</p><p>Frank Castle knows better than that, though. If it seems quiet, that’s only because he’s not looking in the right place.</p><p>He finally tracks down some mid-level Russian, and as much as he’d like to just shoot him, dead men usually aren’t that talkative. So instead, Frank disarms him—a quick strike to the wrist—and gets him down to ground, his cheek against the asphalt. He yanks his left arm back, bends the elbow, and pulls it behind his back, pulling, pulling, until he feels the release of the shoulder from its joint.</p><p>The little fucker is screaming, crying in pain, as if he’s never had a shoulder dislocated before. Frank pauses and realizes that perhaps he hasn’t ever had a shoulder dislocated before. Not everybody lives his kind of life, after all.</p><p>That doesn’t mean he’s going to get coddled, though. Frank pins the arm in place with his knee and lifts the man’s face off the ground.</p><p>“Stop. Screaming.”</p><p>He does, just like that, though he’s still whimpering, tears still streaming down his face.</p><p>“So, what’s going down tonight? Why’s it so quiet?”</p><p>“I—I don’t know—”</p><p>This guy thinks it’s amateur hour, and Frank’s patience is running low.</p><p>He slams his face down into the concrete and yanks it back up.</p><p>“Try again.”</p><p>“There’s—there’s a truce tonight, that’s all I know!”</p><p>“Now why would there be a truce, asshole?”</p><p>“I don’t know, they don’t tell me everything, I’m just—nobody, I drive people around, shoot where they tell me to—they don’t share their plans—and I don’t want to die, so I don’t ask!”</p><p>Frank grits his teeth. His gut tells him this is the real deal.</p><p>“Who’s the truce between, then?”</p><p>“Everybody—Albanians, Russians, Fisk, Chinese, Yakuza—"</p><p>Fisk. That tells Frank pretty much everything he needs to know, and he pulls out his pistol and shoots him in the back of the head.</p><p>The only time Hell’s Kitchen is quiet is when the scumbags are whispering.</p><p>---<br/>
<br/>
</p><p>He finds another guy, not the highest in the chain of command, but apparently he keeps his ears to the ground.</p><p>The crack of a broken leg.</p><p>“What’s going down tonight?” Frank asks.</p><p>He patiently waits out the screaming.</p><p>“You gonna answer me, or do I gotta break the other one?”</p><p>“The Devil—” he chokes out, “the Devil’s gonna die tonight. Big Man wanted it to be a whole production.”</p><p>Oh. Frank closes his eyes and can’t help that he sees Murdock in his mind’s eye. Red in his stupid suit, running his smart red mouth. Murdock in court, wearing a red tie. Still running his smart red mouth, because talking’s like breathing for the guy.</p><p>Red dragging Frank away way from the dank basement that the redheaded Irishman had tortured him in, foot dragging awkwardly behind.</p><p>Murdock on a rooftop, maskless, holding a woman’s body in his hands, the expression on his face such a visceral reminder of Frank’s own loss that he’d packed up his scope and headed out, unable to stay and bear witness a moment longer.</p><p>“Where?”</p><p>---<br/>
<br/>
</p><p>At first, Frank thinks it’s all fine. On the police scanner, he can hear the preliminary reports, calls coming in that there’s a hostage situation on a low rooftop, a sort of structure built and a man suspended from it. Frank hasn’t had the strongest of faith in institutions lately, but he still thinks the cops will take care of it.</p><p>Of course, when he gets to the address from the reports, he sees that there’s a whole bunch of cops sitting in the pizza joint across the street, backs to the window for plausible deniability, chewing their way through a cheese pizza that Frank viciously hopes tastes like shit.</p><p>This situation is not helping Frank regain his faith in the NYPD. Or cops in general. Or <em>people</em> in general.</p><p>He can’t quite make out everything from street level, not with the lights on the corners of the buildings shining into his eyes.</p><p>So he gets up, goes to a nearby rooftop to examine the situation before figuring out how to respond. This is where he and Murdock are different—Murdock would have run right into the situation, and then it probably would’ve been FUBAR.</p><p>---</p><p>Frank Castle has a strong stomach, but what he sees horrifies even him.</p><p>Apparently Fisk thought it would be funny to crucify the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen.</p><p>
  <span>Not crucify in the sense of talking shit in the press, crucify as in <em>tie to a cross and pierce through with nails. </em></span>
</p><p>
  <span>Frank’s been called a monster before—hell, even by the Devil himself—but he must not be a very good one, because he can’t fathom ever nailing a man to a cross. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>He thinks about the Mexican cartel, how easy it had been to string their bodies up on meat hooks like they were just hunks of flesh. At least they’d been dead first, and they were hardly innocent. His wife’s blood was on their hands, and his children’s blood, too. He amends his earlier thought—he can’t fathom nailing a man to a cross for the crime of trying to do some fucking good. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Red’s out cold, his head lolling forward and body fixed into position with ropes. There’s a gag stuffed into his mouth, and that’s the thing that gets to Frank, really. He remembers that night on the rooftop, the way Red had tried to talk him out of killing Grotto, the way he’d turned to the only thing he had left when his body was chained up. Now even that’s been taken away, and that’s an indignity too far for Frank. </span>
</p><p>The guy doing Fisk’s dirty work gathers the muscle of Murdock’s bicep and presses the nail into the spot he wants, eyeing it for a moment before using a hammer to—</p><p>And that’s when Frank learns that Red <em>isn’t</em> out cold after all. His head is hanging low, lolling aimlessly like he doesn’t have the strength to hold it up—the thought makes Frank uncomfortable, that Matt Murdock, the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen, can’t even hold his own head up anymore. But when that nail pierces through his flesh, his head shoots up and he <em>screams</em>—and suddenly the gag makes sense. Hard for the cops across the street to deny that anything’s happening if people hear the screaming.</p><p>Something twists in Frank’s gut. He’s more disturbed by it than he thought he would be, and he swallows back bile.</p><p>There’s no clear shot, is the problem, and Frank doesn’t want to risk shooting Red, and a nonlethal shot might push the guy to try to kill Red, or use him as leverage—just generally add a level of unpredictability to the situation that Frank doesn’t want to deal with.</p><p>“Red, can you hear me?” he asks quietly into the wind.</p><p>Murdock doesn’t respond.</p><p>“Red,” Frank repeats, “gimme a sign, man, I need to know if you’re hearing me.”</p><p>Murdock lifts his head, blood on his chin from a lip he might’ve bloodied himself trying to suppress his screams.</p><p>It’s just a moment, just the smallest thing, but he looks up and aims his head towards where Frank is and nods his head a fraction of an inch.</p><p>There are tears on his cheeks, and it makes Frank want blood.</p><p>Red struggles weakly against the ropes, and Fisk’s rat is surprised enough that he drops the nail he was holding.</p><p>He has to bend down to pick it up, and Frank aims carefully and shoots true.</p><p>He’s quiet and careful as he gets down from his vantage point and over to the right building, careful not to arouse suspicion of the policemen who are just very invested in their meal.</p><p>Maybe a server spit into their drinks, Frank thinks, and the thought makes him almost smile as he makes his way across to Red.</p><p>The first thing he does is take off the gag.</p><p>“Now,” Red says weakly, “what’s a man like you doin’ in a place like this?”</p><p>Something in Frank’s gut twists again, relief and amusement together enough to do what nothing else has been able to do tonight.</p><p>He smiles, but at least there’s nobody to see it.</p><p>He double-checks the body and empties a few more rounds into it, just to make sure, and maybe a little bit to make himself feel better.</p><p>“He’s not going to get any deader, Frank,” Red points out with a hoarse voice coming through bleeding lips.</p><p>“Not gonna criticize me for killin’ ‘im?” It’s cruel, to ask this of a man who literally has nails going through him, but the words just slip out of Frank’s mouth.</p><p>Murdock laughs—Christ, the kid has balls of steel, to be able to laugh at a time like this.</p><p>“No, I def’nitely am. Just—need a coffee first. Maybe a bite to eat. I’m too—I’m just—” He waves his fingers, the motion minimal and accompanied by a hiss of breath.</p><p><em>Idiot</em>. Frank looks at the apparatus and tries to figure out the best way to get Red down quickly without hurting him even more. If he just cuts the rope, he’ll truly be suspended by the nails going through his biceps, and that’s not going to feel great. Pulling the nails out first would get rid of that issue, but the idea of it brings the bile clawing back up Frank’s throat. Plus he’d bleed freely and Frank wouldn’t be able to do anything about it until he cut the ropes.</p><p>So instead, he looks at where the rough wood is anchored to its base. It’s heavy, but he might be able to manage…</p><p>“Gonna tip this over, okay? Get you lyin’ flat, then I’ll cut the rope and then we’ll deal with the—”</p><p>“Nails.” Matt finishes.</p><p>“I’m gonna kill Fisk one day,” Frank mutters under his breath, expecting to hear Matt argue.</p><p>He pauses expectantly.</p><p>“Oh <em>no</em>,” Matt says bitterly, “please don’t kill the guy who had me literally crucified, Frank. That would just be so awful.”</p><p>Frank thinks of Matt Murdock as this person who defies normal human limitations. He’s got supersenses. He’ll take a punch for fun. He’s the most stubborn son of a bitch Frank’s ever met, other than the guy in the mirror—but this, this mockery of his own principles, principles he genuinely believes in and holds dear—it’s just one more sign that as resilient as the guy is, as much as he can take, this one is going to take some time to recover from.</p><p>He doesn’t reply, has no words, and so he carefully tries to push the damn thing over. The base is heavier than it looks, though, and it didn’t exactly look like a feather.</p><p>“I’m gonna have to break it,” he says, wishing he didn’t have to.</p><p>But Matt just nods, resigned.</p><p>Frank tries to balance applying the right amount of force and not jostling Matt more than he has to, but this is hardly an exact science.</p><p>Still, eventually the wood cracks and when it does break, Frank is there, wrapping his arms around Red’s torso to control the descent.</p><p>The next part is easy—a knife gets the ropes undone in just a few minutes. Frank looks up, checking for anyone who might be watching. Good cops, bad cops, Fisk’s goons—there’s not a scenario in which being seen wouldn’t fuck things up.</p><p>As if they’re not already fucked up, with Daredevil literally half-crucified.</p><p>Frank looks at Murdock and wishes he could see. There are things there are no words for, and a look—a look would have said more than anything else could have.</p><p>“Don’t worry,” Matt says, and it makes Frank’s chest tighten. “Whatever you do, it’s just to undo what they did. And there’s—there’s not that many of them.”</p><p>He’s right. There’s one in each of his calves, one on either side of his waist—Fisk may have wanted the optics of the Devil on a cross, but he’d gone for one that was broad enough to inflict more pain than even Christ had had to bear.</p><p>And then there are just the two in his arms—he hadn’t gotten to the hands yet, and for that, at least, Frank is grateful.</p><p><em>Thank God</em>, he almost says out loud, but then he remembers that Matt might not take that all too well, so he swallows the words back, along with the bitterness in his mouth.</p><p>He strips the body, ripping off strips of the guy’s shirt to use as bandages to staunch the bleeding once the nails are removed, and then carefully wedges his knife in between Red’s flesh and the head of the nail, pulling upwards in small motions until the nail is free of the wood and then easing it out the rest of the way.</p><p>They repeat that, over and over and over again, and it feels like maybe this isn’t Hell’s Kitchen so much as it is just plain old Hell, and they’re both doomed to do this forever. Frank doesn’t start up a conversation, Matt’s in no state for small talk—stifling little gasps and grimacing, tears running down his cheeks that the mask doesn’t absorb.</p><p>There’s so much blood. It seems impossible that all of this blood could belong to one man, even though Frank’s doing his best to get each wound wrapped tight as fast as he can. The effect is only magnified by the red of the suit and rust-colored trail on his chin.</p><p>But finally, he’s free, and Frank helps him sit up.</p><p>“You’ve gotten all your shots and shit, right? I mean deep puncture wounds are no joke.”</p><p>“Doesn’t matter,” Matt says grimly, “if I have, I’ll be fine. If I do have tetanus, and I can’t mount some sort of immune response, then you should just leave, Frank, because I won’t make it to the nearest <em>ambulance</em>, let alone the nearest hospital or seedy clinic.”</p><p>Frank tries to hide the fact that he’s a little thrown by this new Murdock—not traumatized in a repressed, quiet way, but angry, bitter, indifferent.</p><p>He wraps an arm around him and lifts him up, supporting as much of his weight as he can as they head back towards Murdock’s apartment.</p><p>Red’s quiet the whole time, and Frank can feel it when his strength starts to flag, when Frank has to bear more of his weight and generate more of the momentum that drags them onward.</p><p>Finally they get to the damn penthouse, and Murdock falls to the couch.</p><p>“Frank?”</p><p>“Hm?”</p><p>“Thank you for coming for me.” His voice is small and tired, and as much as the man courts death, Frank’s realizing now that maybe he doesn’t want to die, after all.</p><p>Maybe they’re both realizing that.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Clearly this is a much longer fic in my head that includes way more recovery and bonding and slowly falling in love, but for the purposes of fratt week, we'll call it a day here... watch this space, though, I might be persuaded to add more to this.</p></blockquote></div></div>
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